Opting for surveillance of migrants instead of rescue operations will result in death by drowning, or torture and possible deaths in Libya. For both scenarios, the EU has cultivated its own brand of impunity. Looking away has become politically acceptable, and the bloc can focus on funding the Libyan Coast Guard to do its dirty work.

If you're not burdened by a conscience, it's a perfect get-rich-quick scheme: offer 'garrison' services to governments reluctant to get their hands dirty. Ensure the vulnerable people you 'manage' are hidden, demonised by politicians and right-wing commentators. Hire cheap labour, minimise your tax, and make millions.

Even during the brief six months I worked on Manus I saw a group of healthy, good-humoured men reduced to shadows. On this anniversary we must protest and mourn not only the toll on human life incurred by six years of offshore processing, but also the Frankenstein mechanisms through which this has all been enacted.

The defeat of Bill Shorten will impact particularly harshly on thousands of asylum seekers who arrived by sea during the Gillard and Second Rudd governments. The 'Fast Track Assessment Process' has left thousands of genuine refugees in limbo and made lawful what would otherwise be considered gross administrative misfeasance.

To what extent has society reacted to the deaths of these two children? Awareness stops with the available imagery. Drowned children on western shores are processed differently in our psyche to the children killed in drone attacks, their absence of identity compounded by statistics which dissociate humanity from numbers.

In Boochani's experience, Australians were homogenous and unreflective parts of a machine designed to dehumanise, cow and corrupt the people who sought protection. This report and the departmental response suggest that in on-shore detention the human destruction is not directly intended. It is seen simply as irrelevant.

We are expected to believe that all those perceived Labor failures, plus the massive anti-Labor Clive Palmer campaign and the attraction of some positive Coalition policies, only shifted a little over one Australian in every hundred, though more in some states like Queensland and some individual seats. That analysis can't be right.

It's long fascinated me that it tends to be the conservative side of politics that has delivered many of our Indigenous political firsts. Perhaps it's simply because Indigenous conservatives are, by virtue of their politics, no real threat to the status quo. Our Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt is a case in point.